Virtually any significant undertaking today requires a team of people, both in the planning stage and in the execution stage. Organizing and coordinating these teams frequently requires that the team members meet frequently in order to plan and to coordinate their activities. In these meetings, one of the attendees typically makes a presentation. These presentations often include some audiovisual aspects, such as “charts” generated in the Microsoft PowerPoint or Lotus Freelance Graphics computer programs, or a live demo.
Historically, holding a meeting has required that each of the team members, or at least a few of their representatives, assemble at a single location, such as a conference room. Although this process worked reasonably well for organizations located at a single location, modern “matrix” organizations commonly ask people located in different states or even different countries to work together. Although these matrix organizations can provide significant efficiencies, the basic need to meet to organize, plan, and coordinate actions is unchanged.
The traditional solution to this problem is to bring all of the team members together at a single location, often yearly or semiannually. However, this solution has obvious drawbacks. For example, the time and cost necessary to get each team member to a single location can be considerable, and many problems occur between meetings. To address these problems, many organizations are replacing the traditional face-to-face meeting with electronic meetings or “eMeetings.”
Although eMeetings have improved productivity in the workplace, one problem is that if a participant is looking at a presentation or a demo, the participant can only view the current chart. That is, if a prulicipant wants to clarify something from a previous chart, the participant has to obtain a separate copy of the charts in order to get that clarification. In many cases, this is impossible because the eMeetings include a live demo or because the charts are updated throughout the meeting.
Without a way to give the participants more control over what they are seeing, the promise of eMeetings may never be fully achieved.